River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  The peasants were aggressive salespeople, shouting and shoving their wares in our faces. By the third stop, I imagined the coming waters inundating the tourist walkways and their stalls, and I thought: Good. This was how I sometimes felt on bad days in Fuling, when there was a hassle on the docks and I became a sort of Chinese Noah. Let the waters come and wash all of this away.

  But these dark thoughts disappeared once I was back on the river, gazing at the clear fast-flowing water. That would disappear as well—the Daning was doomed to rise nearly three hundred feet, its gorges half filled, and these rapids would run clear no more. It would be part of the new reservoir, with the same stagnant water as the Yangtze. Probably that would make things easier for the hay boats, but I suspected that the gleam in the boatsmen’s eyes would also fade away.

  I felt the same sense of loss the next day, when we caught another slow boat down through the big gorges on the Yangtze. Again it was a lovely morning, cold and bright, the wind whipping between the cliffs of the Wu Gorge. We passed the Xiangxi River, home of Qu Yuan, the third-century-B.C. poet, and the home of Wang Zhaojun. She was another of the Four Great Beauties, married off to the Huns for diplomatic reasons during the Han Dynasty. As a girl she had washed her handkerchiefs in the river; or perhaps she had washed the river in her handkerchiefs, because finally the water ran fragrant, sweetened by the beauty on its banks, which was how it came to be called the Xiangxi—the Fragrant River.

  There was so much history along the Yangtze that one couldn’t harbor illusions about untouched nature. Every rock looked like something; every tributary carried its legends; every hill was heavy with the past. With all of this history, it was impossible to say that the new dam was an entirely new sort of violation: Wang Zhaojun had turned her river into perfume, and now Li Peng and the engineers would turn theirs into electricity. Even the relic of the White Crane Ridge had started as a sort of vandalism—Tang Dynasty boatsmen scratching onto a perfectly innocent piece of sandstone—and if the man-made dam destroyed the man-made carvings, there was perhaps something appropriate about that. The engravings had been made to serve boatsmen, just as the river had always served man in so many ways.

  But to have it simply stop—to turn the river into a lake—for some reason that bothered me more than anything else. In a selfish way, I didn’t mind so much the lost temples, or the scenery’s lessened magnificence, or even the displaced people. The part that bothered me the most was all that stagnant water; I didn’t want to see the Daning and the Xiangxi and the Yangtze slow down. I couldn’t explain it other than that they were clearly meant to rush forward; that was their essential nature. There was power and life and exuberance in those rivers, and in a decade all of that would be lost.

  We came out of the Xiling Gorge and cruised into the construction site of the dam. It was absolutely indescribable—too many cranes, too many dredging boats, too many piles of dirt and stone on the river’s banks. I had my notebook out but I wrote nothing; the size of the thing overwhelmed me. Across a distant mountain an enormous propaganda sign proclaimed in twenty-foot-high characters: “Build the Three Gorges, Exploit the Yangtze.” Even those eight characters, although they said a great deal, didn’t describe very much.

  The only describable part of the scene was our boat. It slowed as we reached the construction site, and every passenger came shivering onto the deck. There were People’s Liberation Army soldiers, young couples with their babies, and old peasants in military surplus coats. Many of them had stayed in their cabins when we went through the Wu and Xiling Gorges, because it was so cold, but now everybody stood entranced on deck as we passed the cranes and trucks and piles of stone. They snapped pictures. They pointed at the cranes. The Chinese flag flapped in the wind. I looked closely at the faces around me, and what I saw was awe and determination—awe at the massive scale of the dam, and determination to withstand the cold and see every inch of the project that they could. Even the babies seemed to have that look in their eyes.

  THE WU RIVER

  THE OLD FISHERMAN has no real hope of catching anything. “The fishing’s no good now,” he says. “In the winter it’s too cold; the fish don’t move much. Mostly I come here because I’m retired—I come just to play.” He smiles and looks out over the green water of the Wu River. The old man is perched on a rock, and beside him his rod is also sitting upright, anchored under a stone. For hours at a stretch they sit beside each other, the old man and his fishing rod, and on cold days like today they are as silent and still as the rocks themselves, until the fixed points of the scene—the rocks, the rod, the old man—seem a world apart from the cold green water that rushes past on its way to the Yangtze.

  Everything seems slow next to the current of the Wu. At the river’s mouth even the great Yangtze appears to stand still, its muddy water sluggish in comparison to the quick-moving tributary. The waters of the two rivers are so different that on a day like today their junction is defined by a line that looks as sharp and straight as a border on a map: the Yangtze is brown, the Wu green, and they meet like two slivers of painted glass that have been pressed neatly together below the rough-browed peak of White Flat Mountain.

  The Wu is a mountain river. It starts in the heart of Guizhou province, where the hills are wild and the people few, and it falls east and north to Sichuan. There are only a handful of cities along its length, none bigger than Fuling, and so the water stays green and clear until it meets the Yangtze. The Wu isn’t wide enough for big river cruisers—many of its navigable channels narrow to thirty or forty feet during the dry season—and in any case there is no reason for the big boats to follow the green track upstream. Even here on the banks of the East River district, where the heart of the city lies just across the Wu, one can look upriver and see wild steep mountains in the distance. They crowd against the narrow airspace above the river, and their rugged blue shapes give some sense of the remoteness of the upper Wu.

  All rivers have distinct personalities, intangible traits that go beyond width and length and swiftness, and the two rivers in Fuling are so dissimilar that their conversation is limited to the terse color line at the Wu’s mouth. The Yangtze is peopled—it has been channeled, prodded, diverted, dammed; buoys mark its shallows and boats of all sizes crest its polluted waters. It goes to Shanghai. The Wu—clear, green, lightly traveled—comes from the mountains. One river is all about origin; the other, destination: this is what defines the contrast in their personalities. The Yangtze in its size and majesty seems to be going somewhere important, while the Wu in its narrow swiftness seems to have come from someplace wild and mysterious; and the faint forms of its distant hills suggest that the river will keep its secrets. You can fish all day long and the Wu will give you nothing.

  Carp are a slow-water fish and they are all the old man is hoping for, along with the other eight fishermen who sit here with their rods. They are spread across a rocky inlet that breaks the river’s flow, their lines trailing off into a dead spot where the water bulges slightly as the current rebounds from the rocks. “The carp around here can be from one to eight pounds,” the old man says. “In town you’d pay seven or eight yuan a pound, but we don’t sell them—we eat them ourselves. You can also catch black carp, but usually that’s in the faster current. The river has yellow croaker, too—that’s the best fish in the Wu, but you can’t catch it here on the banks. It sells for twenty to thirty yuan a pound! And in the summer there’s grass carp, but in the summer, when the fishing’s better, there are so many more people here.”

  The fisherman is sixty-five years old, and for more than a decade he has been retired from the Chongqing factory where he used to work. He wears heavy-rimmed glasses and a dirty worn suit, and he is bent by age. They are a contrast, this pair—the fragile-looking old man and his brand-new eight-foot-long collapsible aluminum rod. “It cost one hundred and fifty yuan,” he says proudly. He is smoking, like all of the other men on the bank, and he smells faintly of alcohol. He talks about another kind of fis
h, perhaps the best fish in the river, the fish nobody ever catches. He says its name, but he is a dialect speaker and the word—something like sanyu—is hard to understand, and he doesn’t know how to write it. In any case, great fish are often nameless. “It’s very rare and very good to eat,” he says, “but our government protects it. It costs one hundred yuan a pound! If you catch it and nobody else is around, you can walk away. But if anybody else is there you have to throw it back.” He says this with a certain seriousness, as if he were quoting from a law that explicitly gives such instructions. He clears his throat and spits on the rocks, and then he looks down his empty line to the dead spot in the river.

  THE CHARACTER for Wu is shaped vaguely like a bird—a tiny tuft on top, a square head with a hooked beaklike notch, a single straight line that represents a wing. Like some Chinese characters, its form echoes part of the meaning: “crow.” It also means black, or dark, and perhaps the name refers to the color of the river, the way it swells an angry blue-black when storm clouds roll in over the valley, their heavy shadows bruising the water long before a drop has struck the surface.

  But nobody in Fuling seems to know for certain the origin of the river’s name, and its color is as quicksilver as the brown Yangtze is unchanging. In summer, when the rains are frequent and the snowmelt steady, the swollen Wu tends to run a smooth brown, its color fading indistinctly into the muddy Yangtze. As the dry season begins in late autumn, the river shifts from brown to gray to deep blue-green, until at last in winter it stretches like a narrow band of jade scratched white by the rapids.

  Now the dry season is past its midpoint but the spring rains have yet to come, and for weeks the Wu has run blue-green without change. It is late afternoon; the rapids near the bank flicker in the setting sun. Beyond the old fisherman, slabs of sandstone are jumbled into the very heart of the river, and a pair of students have leaped from rock to rock until they stand on a stony island in the midst of the rushing current. It is a beautiful spot—so close to the water that one can feel the cold air pushed by the current, the uneven chill that the river has swept north all the way from Guizhou. The students sit on the rock, gazing at the scenery, listening to the river. For a moment in the heart of the Wu there is no sound other than the fluid voice of its current.

  North of the students, a boat is docked near the road that runs down from the East River district, and five men chat on the deck while the sun sets. Their boat is eighty feet long, its deck half covered with barrels of ferric oxide. Tomorrow there will be more cargo to load, but today’s work is finished, and the men smoke cigarettes while they rest and watch the sun drop.

  Soon they will be bound for the city of Jiangyin in Jiangsu province, a thousand miles down the Yangtze. They will float under the cliffs of the Three Gorges, past the lowlands and lakes of central China, and on toward the country’s far east. The journey will take seven days.

  “Usually we don’t go that far,” says the owner of the boat. “Usually we go to Hunan—we take these barrels downriver and then we bring back feldspar for the ceramics factory. It takes about five days to get to Hunan. That’s Chairman Mao’s home province, did you know? We usually stop about half an hour from his hometown of Shaoshan. No, I’ve never been there. But Hunan is good—it’s better than here. The transportation is more developed, and so is the economy. It’s flatter there—it’s not a mountainous region like this. Fuling has bad transportation. Most places I’ve seen in China are more developed than here.”

  The man is forty-three years old, and without talking to him it would be difficult to guess that he is the owner of the boat. He wears a dirty gray suit and tennis shoes, and he squats on the deck, smoking Magnificent Sound cigarettes. He smokes the cheap ones, the four-yuan packs that are the standard for Fuling’s laobaixing, Old Hundred Names, the common folk. His hands are dirty. His shoulders are broad and strong. He is a hands-on boss; he supervises the loading, and he rides down the Yangtze with the other eight workers who make up his crew. Clearly he is close to the other men, and he carries himself more or less as one of their equals—in fact, he is slow to acknowledge that the boat is his. But the others treat him with a quiet respect, and when a stranger approaches it is the boss who does most of the talking.

  “Two of the workers can drive,” he says. “I can’t, but you only need two—one to drive and one to rest. It’s harder to drive a boat than a car, you know. It only takes two or three months of studying to learn to drive a car, but on the river it takes five years before you’re ready for the examination. A license costs ten thousand yuan. It takes so much money and trouble because if you make a mistake with the boat, it’s very dangerous.

  “The Three Gorges aren’t too risky if you understand the river, though. Of course, if you don’t know the river, it’s difficult, but we’ve been through there many times. And after all those trips it’s not so interesting anymore. The scenery is beautiful, of course, but I’ve seen it many, many times.”

  His remarks echo the words of another boatsman, written long ago: “Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!”

  And undoubtedly Mark Twain, who also lamented the construction of wing dams along the Mississippi, would have been even more saddened to see a river like the Yangtze trapped behind huge walls of concrete. But this Fuling boatsman is still a boatsman; his interest is shipping, not the lore and history and poetry of the river. He shrugs when asked about the new dam; it won’t have much effect on his trade. The major change will be that he’ll have to traverse the new locks, an eight-step process that will likely take six or seven hours. But that won’t be a problem, and in any case he is a man who has struggled against the river as often as he has been borne by its current. In a small way he tames the Yangtze every month, and the taming of it on a larger scale does nothing but impress him.

  “That dam is very big,” he says. “Have you seen it? Since they diverted the river it’s very wonderful. Now we go through a side channel like this—”

  With his finger he sketches on the deck of the boat: the bend of the new diversion, the dry riverbed, the construction site. The other men watch, interested. The sun has dipped below the western hills; the air is growing colder. There are no boats on the Wu now and the twilit water has a purple tint.

  The boat’s cabin glows white in the dying light. The men continue talking, and the boss explains how most of his working life was spent as a technician for the local television broadcasting company. “It was a good job,” he says. “The working conditions were good, but the salary was too low, so I decided to change. I bought this boat in 1993, for more than four hundred thousand yuan. Most of the owners of this kind of boat are like me—we’re independent, without a danwei. The owner decides where it goes and how long it will take. That’s good—we have freedom. Usually we make about one trip a month, and then we rest here in Fuling. This is our hometown, myself and all the workers. It’s good to see other parts of China, but this is where we live.”

  He motions broadly with his Magnificent Sound cigarette—to the hills of the East River district, to the fading blue mound of Raise the Flag Mountain, to the gray downtown buildings and their early-evening lights. The lights streak orange across the dark rapids of the untamed Wu, illuminating the cold clean water that rushes into the brown Yangtze and then runs eastward—past the Three Gorges, past Mao’s home province, past Jiangyin, where the men will finish their next journey, past Shanghai to its muddy mouth and the emptiness of the East China Sea.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Opium Wars

  I LEARNED ABOUT DENG XIAOPING’S DEATH from Anne, one of my students. I had just returned from vacation; it was the heart of the dry season and the Wu River was l
ow. Children along the shoreline flew kites, the way they did all across China after the Spring Festival.

  On February 20, I noticed that the Chinese flag on the teaching building was at half-mast. But I didn’t think much of it until I went to get my spare key from Anne, who lived downstairs and had been watching my apartment.

  “Have you heard what happened?” she asked.

  “Here in the college?”

  “No, in Beijing,” she said. “Deng Xiaoping is dead.”

  I said that I was sorry, and I asked when he had passed away.

  “Yesterday. They told us on the television today before noon. When I heard, I felt like crying.”

  She smiled as she spoke, but it was the Chinese smile that served as a mask against deeper feelings. Those smiles could hide many emotions—embarrassment, anger, sadness. When the people smiled like that, it was as if all of the emotion was wound tightly and displaced; sometimes you caught a glimpse of it in the eyes, or at the corner of a mouth, or perhaps in a single wrinkle stretching sadly across a forehead. Anne had high cheekbones and deep dimples, and today I thought I saw a trace of her sadness wavering along her cheek.

  “The funeral will be on Tuesday,” she said. “They will cancel class in the college.”

  “Well,” I said, “he had a very long life.”

  “He was ninety-three years old. I think that everybody in China is sad today. Especially here in Sichuan—you know that Deng Xiaoping was from Sichuan.”

  She smiled once more, but now the sadness at her dimple shivered away into pride. I took my key and thanked her, heading back upstairs to my apartment.

  I thought about Anne’s father, the math professor who had spent eight years of the Cultural Revolution working in a Sichuan coal mine, and I knew that Deng Xiaoping had suffered hardships of the same kind. He had been purged twice, and his son had been paralyzed after a mysterious fall from an upper-story window during an interrogation by Red Guards. And yet Deng had survived to lead the country out of the Cultural Revolution, and he was responsible for the recovery of people like Anne’s father.